Dave Stephenson

Sad news, confirmed yesterday by Creative Review - The Designers Republic has closed, with the loss of nine jobs.

TDR has been blurring the border between design and art for almost a quarter of a century and, along with Tomato and Peter Saville, has had an incredible influence on the creative side of my brain. Its work for Gatecrasher (so many hours spent looking for those tiny messages in the CD booklet), Warp, even it’s own website was so packed full of detail, clean and precise it made you stop and want to spend time looking at it, touching it, feeling it. Their use of language and, in their own words, “font-ology” added an extra layer to their work, bringing a level of personality far beyond the product they were designing for.

It’s founder, Ian Anderson, has said that it lost its way in the last couple of years, focussing more on big corporate clients rather than its core reason for being - to create. Compromise and the dilution of ideas is inevitable when dealing with large corporates. It takes integrity and honesty in approach and execution to be able to manage those compromises, whilst still delivering a project that both designer and client are happy with. It’s a very difficult balance to achieve - especially given the sums of money involved in large contracts - and Anderson is clearly uncomfortable with the position TDR had taken recently.

Anderson is looking on the end of TDR as a new beginning - an opportunity to return to the companies roots and move forward without returning to the enforced agency structure he’d moved into. It will be interesting to see what effect that has on the work he produces and whether more agencies and studios follow suit.

To be honest, I’ve never felt a great deal of affection for Birmingham. Sure, between 2002 and 2005 I lived and worked in various parts of the city, but it’s never really felt welcoming or homely. For me, it’s always been a means to an end, all purpose and no substance.

Since a disastrous final job in programming finally brought me to a position where I could break free and move out of the city, whilst beginning a completely new career, I’ve not found myself in the city centre that often. A few nights out, a couple of months freezing in abandoned car parks shooting a film and the odd shopping trip are all that have tempted me back, but for some reason I decided that today was going to be the day I gave Birmingham City Centre a second chance. It turned out to be the day that I realised just what a worrying state it’s in.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there have been massive improvements in recent years. The Mailbox has become a(nother) lively but relaxing area full of bars and restaurants, alongside the designer shops that nobody ever buys anything from. The Bullring has transformed the City Centre, with the refurbished Rotunda and iconic-Selfridges-building™ at the heart of ™™it all. But look a bit closer and all’s not quite as it should be.

The first problem is that Birmingham’s famous Renaissance, brought about by the reopening of the Bullring, is based purely on retail and commerce. There are at least five main shopping “malls” in the centre, many of which contain the same high street chains as the others. With Woolworths, Zavvi, Whittards and Officers Club currently closing or in administration (rumours of Officers Club’s current predicament being attributable to the missing apostrophe are currently unconfirmed), it’s beginning to look a bit like Dawn of the Dead down there, with zombie stores cropping up more often than a branch of Starbucks (of which there are 4 in the Bullring, by my count). And that’s not counting the empty units (one more added in the past couple of days since Hawkins’ Bazaar closed it’s Christmas shop).

The purpose built “shell” in St. Martin’s Square remains closed, following the failure of two franchise coffee shops, Paradise Circus has about 25% of its commercial floor space up for rent and the top end of Corporation Street is as dead as chances of The Simpsons ever being funny again. As spending dwindles and the crunch bites hard, will Birmingham be able to survive as a relevant commercial centre or has it placed so many of its eggs into one big, credit card dependent basket that it will have to reinvent itself again, so soon after having done so once before?

That’s where the Big City Plan comes in. Only it doesn’t, because its entire public facing presence is shoddy, badly designed rubbish. Oh, and it won’t happen because it will cost too much, take too long and will fail to engage with the population. It’s a shame, because there are some truly wonderful ideas in there, but Birmingham has such a long history of short term solutions and schemes that aren’t properly though out that it’s doomed to fail.

The Rotunda is full of luxury apartments, all of which currently have wet towels and underpants hanging over in their floor to ceiling windows due to lack of drying space. Hardly the appearance the planners were going for when they imagined Birmingham’s core architectural landmark as a flagship representation of city centre living.

Millennium Point cost £114m to build and receives a grand total of around 300k visitors per year. Over 7 years that’s 2.1m visitors (and, given that initial numbers were around 200k a year, that’s being generous). So, it’s cost £54 per visitor so far - and that’s not including running costs.

New Street station is about to be redeveloped, but any improvements will be purely cosmetic as there’s no space for extra lines to ease congestion through the notorious bottleneck. When the new Bullring was built, Network Rail had the option to install two new lines through the foundations, which would allow through trains to bypass the station completely, freeing up platforms for stopping services. Having not done it at the time, it’s impossible for them to do it now, so although we’ll have a gleaming new glass building, all the trains will still run as (in)efficiently as they do now. And besides, why build a destination shopping centre before you cause massive disruption to the main public transport access to it?

Anyway, before this gets too ranty, I’ll bring it to a close. Suffice to say that Birmingham needs to learn some lessons - quickly. It needs to stop placing so much emphasis on facades and giant public spaces like Centenary Square and Millennium Point that spend most of their time unused and concentrate on the basics, such as infrastructure, sustainability and diversification. I certainly don’t believe it’s a lost cause. As a company, we’re moving to the heart of Birmingham’s creative quarter in January, which opens up massive possibilities for us and there’s a growing, passionate community that is committed to driving the city and the region forward, both creatively and financially.

But what really needs to happen is something that can’t be achieved with a simple action or ranting blog post from someone who doesn’t even live in Birmingham anymore - it needs to find its sense of place; a sense of community and purpose beyond being a big shopping centre. Birmingham’s more than a series of disconnected, cold and sterile areas, but at the moment it just doesn’t feel like it. What is Birmingham? What does it mean to you? What can it, will it be in 10 years time? And what do we have to do to get there?

A few similarities you may or may not have noticed recently…

Sony have just brought out Little Big Planet, backed up with this TV spot:

And here’s Dane Cook telling us how much we suck at Photoshop:

Berocca have famously “drawn inspiration from” OK Go:

And, of course, Fiat “paid tribute to” zZz (although, to be fair, they did pay for the honour, as covered by Creative Review earlier this year:

In short, we’ve got three famous YouTube success stories that have been converted into mainstream TV ads - with varying levels of success. There’s no big new point that hasn’t been made before here - just more evidence that the work created by small production companies, independents and off duty comedians is gaining an increasing influence with the traditional “big players”. Democratisation of the media is coming. Whether that’s a good thing is still up for discussion.

Third attempt at my own little egotistical space for ramblings and we’ll see how we get on.   Third time lucky, as they say. It will take a little while to knock it into shape, but you can’t go wrong with a bit of grey Helvetica.

The major difference, of course, is the fact that, having joined the Cult of Jobs, I’ve now got something more than a PC that’s been cobbled together, hacked apart, rebuilt from four dead ones and shoved haphazardly into an old Dell tower case.   Or even a dan.   It’s a brave new world - and very convenient it is too.